Recent News

During the fall months of 2011 Robert Ashley will be the subject of a great deal of activity in New York City.  In the first week of November, Incubator Arts Project in Manhattan will feature Robert Ashley’s chamber music, which is sometimes overlooked in deference to his massive contribution to opera.  This concert series is part of a New York city-wide celebration of Robert Ashley’s work taking place as part of the Performa 11 visual art biennial, and including a performance of his opera “That Morning Thing” at the legendary Kitchen performance space.  December will see a retrospective in Philadelphia of the work of the Sonic Arts Union, a cooperative group Ashley co-founded in the late 1960s.  And finally, Perfect Lives will be presented in Spanish this December at Irondale Theater, Brooklyn in a new production under the expert guidance of Peter Gordon and Alex Waterman.  Vidas Perfectas is a co-production between Issue Project Room and Ballroom Marfa in cooperation with Irondale Brooklyn and has received support from the NEA.  They are currently raising the additional funds needed through USA Artists. Ashley, now 81, has never been a musical figure that one could call sedentary or even under-recognized, but this recent increase in the presentation of his work still feels long overdue.

In this spirit, and to further celebrate the work of Mr. Ashley, whose music has been an important presence in DRAM since our inception through the label, Lovely Music, DRAM is featuring the music of Robert Ashley in the month of October. We are presenting the writing of Alex Waterman on the translation and re-telling of Ashley’s opera Perfect Lives and its new life as Vidas Perfectas, as well as a playlist of Ashley’s music on DRAM, highlighting his great opera tetralogy.